Normally, I use this space to talk about a (hopefully) fresh software venture or other, or a new tech trend that has caught my attention in recent weeks. However, this time I want to share a slightly different subject that starts with a recent catch-up meeting I had with Bijoy Goswami, Bootstrap founder and Austin evangelist, where we were talking about mapping and roots.
The 28th annual running of UT-Austin’s Global Moot Corp was completed this past weekend and, for the first time for this event, I participated as a judge. In case you didn’t catch the post-event coverage of the event, there were a couple of outcomes worth note. First, already informally regarded as the “super bowl” of investment competition, the event will be henceforth renamed the Venture Labs Investment Competition, reflecting the true nature of what it [...]
You’ve got to hand it to the mice in the ATX promotion machine…they are eating their multi-vitamins these days and spinning the wheels of Austin goodness extra fast in the major media. Take Time magazine’s recent coverage of Austin.
It’s been said: “Imitation is the sincerest forms of flattery.” But, what if the imitation involves completely copying whole sections or the entire works of others? Or, what if the imitation turns out to be a complete fake, but nonetheless is passed off as the real thing? On the eve of SXSW, these question about “who owns ideas?” and “what is original?” are, in my opinion, more important than ever to our city and, frankly, [...]
Jeff Collier wants to update the Christian community for Net Generation. Enter Zetify.com
I served as a judge for the 3rd annual cleantech venture summit (CEVS) yesterday, produced by the Austin Technology Incubator’s clean energy incubator (CEI). Between the morning and afternoon sessions, there were a little over 20 different deals that were pitched by company founders.
Normally, my goal with this space is to write about Austin-area companies that are intriguing, but maybe not “on the radar” yet. But, I’m cheating a bit this time, by writing about Conformity. I met Scott Bils, its founding CEO, more than three years ago when we were both laboring away at ventures – me in services, he in software – that were focused on helping companies in the post-Sarbanes Oxley regulatory world. Scott’s firm [...]
I sometimes think of my friend Glyn Meek as a modern day “Thomas Edison of technology” mainly because he is always working on least 3-4 inventions at once. It could be posters made of hundreds of micro-satellite photos, it might be a new search technology (like Llesiant, that we wrote about earlier this year), it might be the processes for scaling up for a dramatic event like the World Congress of IT when it was [...]
Freshtech Friday by Steve Guengerich The quest for the “killer app” is like the search for the Holy Grail: irresistible and never-ending. Of course, like website UIs and Michelle Obama’s wardrobe, everyone has an opinion about what it will be. Many think the answer is communications. I enjoyed a recent interview with Tim Bray, Director of Web Technologies at Sun, on this subject. You can watch (or read) his full interview. Here’s the relevant excerpt: [...]
Freshtech Friday by Steve Guengerich Whether you use Twitter or not, it continues to gain business and consumer users at a rate that can’t be ignored. Austin, of course, deserves a wee bit of credit for helping Twitter take off, when it became the hit of SXSW Interactive 2007, winning the web award that year along with many an influential user. Fast forward nearly two years, and twitter is everywhere: Sales and marketing: with hometown [...]
